About this tutorial

This is the first chapter in a series of 5 lighting tutorials for Cinema 4D.

The files of this tutorial were created by using release 11.5 but I had no problem opening them in release 10. Release 9.6 or earlier does not work unfortunately.

Concerning the fact that not everybody owns the Advanced Render or a third party render, I will try to concentrate on the functions of the core-render in Cinema 4D as much as possible. It should be possible for everyone to follow this tutorial. As you might see over this series of tutorials using classical ways of illumination does not mean getting bad results. Another point is that features such as Global Illumination (or Radiosity in earlier versions of Cinema 4d) have strong differences in their workflow, parameters and functionality in depending on the version you use for your work. The attributes manager contains a lot of folders for the different settings. In the following screenshots I will only show areas where changes have been made, the rest being in default.

So let's start...

We have to think about the fact that such a lighting situation is a combination of a variety of light sources such as moonlight, lamps placed in the scene , light coming from lamps outside the view- area of the camera, bouncing light reflected by the surfaces and even the reflected light generated by the foggy elements. Therefore we never have one light source in our environment even at night.

The Render Settings

While we look at the render setting menu we can see that I used Ambient Occlusion which is part of the Advanced Render. Well, if you do not have the AR it is not an essential feature to follow this tut- It just looks nicer. The other point is sub polygon displacement. To get a workaround, just subdivide the meshes and use the normal displacement in the material manager.

The render resolution very much depends on the performance of your system, but using a wide of 320 pixels only might be too small...

The glow I activated here could be done in post work also. If you have problems with your render speed while using anti-aliasing, you can set it to "None" of course (Fig.01)

Fig.01

The Moonlight

Of course we need some moonlight here in our scene. There is no need to figure out a clear position for this light source. If you take a look at the editor screenshot you can do it in a similar way as I did. The color of the moonlight has a slight "blueish" tint and the strength is not set to "full power". This is because we will have a lot of lights in the scene later on and so we should avoid having too much light in our alley which could lead to the impression it not being set at night. The contrast is lowered too. In nature mist has a damping effect on rays and so we can simulate that special kind of diffuse illumination. In most cases the shadow strength of the different lights is not set to 100 % which would be unnatural in reality. This delivers an extra bouncing light effect. After all you now have a similar result as in the render of the moonlight pass (Fig.02 - 04).